“Oh, delighted, I’m sure! Quite an honor to have the same lunch with little Miss Hollister.”
Ariadne did not smile at this remark, though from the speaker’s accent it was meant as a pleasantry.
Miss Burgess cast about in her mind for another bit of suitable badinage, but finding none, she began at once on the object of her visit.
“Now, my dear, I want you to listen to all I have to say before you make one objection. It’s an idea of my very own. You’ll let me get through without interruption?”
“Yes, oh, yes,” murmured Lydia, lifting Ariadne down from her high-chair and untying the napkin from about her thin little neck.
The introduction of a new element in her surroundings had for a moment broken the thread of her exalted resolutions. She wondered with a sore heart, as though it had been a common lovers’ quarrel, how she and Paul could ever get over the first sight of each other again. She was wondering how, with the most passionate resolve in the world, she could do anything at all under the leaden garment of physical fatigue which would weigh her down in the months to come.
Miss Burgess began in her best style, which she so evidently considered very good indeed, that she could not doubt Lydia’s attention. It was all about a home for working-women she explained; a new charity which had come from the East, had caught on like anything among the Smart Set of Columbus, and was about to be introduced into Endbury. The most exclusive young people in Columbus—the East End Set (Miss Burgess had a genius for achieving oral capitalization) gave a parlor play for the first benefit there, in one of the Old Broad Street Homes, and they were willing to repeat it in Endbury to introduce it there. A Perfectly splendid crowd was sure to come, tickets could be Any Price, and the hostess who lent her house to it could have the glory of a most unique affair. Mrs. Lowder would be overwhelmed with delight to have the pick of the Society of the Capital at her house, but Miss Burgess had thought it such an opportunity for Miss Lydia to come out of mourning with, since it was for charity. She motioned Lydia, about to speak, sternly to silence: “You said you wouldn’t interrupt! And you haven’t let me say half yet! That’s your side of it—the side your dear mother would think of if she were only here; but there’s another side that you can’t, you oughtn’t to resist!” She finished her tea with a hasty swallow and, going around the table, sat down by Lydia, laying her hand impressively on the young matron’s slim arm. “You’re the sweetest thing in the world, of course, but, like other people of your fortunate class, you can’t realize how perfectly awfully lucky you are, nor how unlucky poor people are! Of course it stands to reason that you can’t even imagine the life of a working-woman—you, a woman of entire leisure, with every want supplied before you speak of it by a husband who adores you! Why, Miss Lydia, to give you some idea let me tell you just one little thing. Lots and lots of the working-women of Endbury live with their families in two or three rooms right on that horrid Main Street near their work because they can’t afford carfares!”
Lydia looked at her without speaking. She remembered her futile, desperate, foolish proposition to Paul to get more time together by living near his work. With a roar, the flood of her bewilderment, diverted for a time, broke over her again. She braced herself against it. Through her companion’s dimly-heard exhortations that, from her high heaven of self-indulgence, she stoop to lend a hand to her less favored sisters, she repeated to herself, clinging to the phrase as though it were a magic formula: “If I can only wish hard enough to make things better, nothing can prevent me.”
The telephone bell rang, and Miss Burgess interrupted herself to say: “It’s for me, I know. I told them at the office to call me up here.” She got herself out of the room in her busy way, her voice soon coming in a faint murmur from the far end of the hall.
Lydia walked to the window to call Ariadne in to put on a wrap, the thought and action automatic. She had buttoned the garment about the child’s slender body before she responded again to the little living presence. Then she took her in a close embrace. With the child’s breath on her face, with her curls exhaling the fresh outdoor air, there came to pass for poor Lydia one of the strange, happy mysteries of the contradictory tangle that is human nature. She had felt it often with Paul after one of their long separations—how mere physical presence can sometimes bring a consolation to the distressed spirit.